How to Add PDF Support to Your Web App in No Time

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PDF files are ubiquitous in many business processes today: From contracts and order forms to schematics and blueprints, PDF has become one of the common interchange formats that gets everyone on the same page.

And while more and more business software is being written with web technologies, PDF files are not as tightly integrated with web apps as they could be, often resulting in less efficient workflows for end users.

In fact, the PDF format (originally developed by Adobe, and now an open standard) was designed to be integrated into other systems, supporting a wide range of features that make it perfect for modeling all types of business processes.

PSPDFKit for Web aims to bring this power to the web. It’s a drop-in JavaScript library that enables viewing and annotating PDF files in the browser without any plugins. It works on both mobile and desktop, and it supports all modern browsers, including IE 11.

Getting Started with PSPDFKit for Web

This tutorial will show you how to add PSPDFKit for Web to a React application to display a fully interactive PDF in the browser. Here’s what we’re going to build:

You should now see your PDF rendered into the #container element. Try using the toolbar to navigate, annotate, and search the document.

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial has demonstrated how easy it is to add PDF support to your web app, and that it gives you ideas on how more business problems could be solved using PDF and the web platform. Learn more about PSPDFKit for Web, see the finished source code for this tutorial, or check out our other example projects for Node.js and Rails.

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PDF's advanced features into your application, covering topics such as how annotations work,
sharing annotations with XSDF and JSON, and protecting documents with digital signatures.